Ignacio Julià, Thurston Moore, James Hamilton & Michael Imperioli: A Conversation

Ignacio Julià started writing about film and music in underground magazine Star in 1977. A contributor to Vibraciones and Rock Espezial, in 1985 he co-founded rock ʼnʼ roll monthly Ruta 66. During the 1990s he hosted an alternative rock show at Catalunya Radio and produced programs for Barcelona TV. He still writes about rock culture for Spain’s leading newspaper, El País. Author of books on John Lennon and Neil Young, he translated Bruce Springsteenʼs autobiography and a Lester Bangs anthology. In English, he published Sonic Youth’s oral history, I Dreamed of Noise, and now Linger On: The Velvet Underground (Ecstatic Peace Library), the definitive collection of his interviews with all members of the iconic, New York-born band, dating back to the 1970s.

James Hamilton is a photographer who began as a painter studying at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1964. He spent the summer of 1966 working as an assistant to a fashion photographer and did not return to school, deciding instead to make photographs of his life in New York City. In 1969 he spent five months hitchhiking and taking pictures throughout the United States. After showing photos from a Texas music festival to the editors at Crawdaddy! – the seminal rock ‘n’ roll publication – he was hired as the staff photographer. That launched a 40-year career of staff positions held at the Herald, the Village Voice, and The New York Times Observer. He has worked on assignments for many titles, including Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and on set with directors George Romero, Francis Ford Coppola, Bill Paxton, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, and many others producing film stills. In 2010 he published a survey of his music photography, You Should’ve Seen What I Just Heard, edited by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth fame. Hamilton’s work was most recently featured in Ignacio Julià’s Linger On: The Velvet Underground (Ecstatic Peace Library). He continues to shoot and lives in New York City.

Michael Imperioli won an Emmy Award for his starring role as Christopher Moltisanti in the acclaimed TV series The Sopranos. He also wrote five episodes of the show; was co-screenwriter of the film Summer of Sam, and contributed to the short story anthology The Nicotine Chronicles. He is also the co-author, with Sopranos co-star Steve Schirripa, of Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos. Additionally, Imperioli is a singer and guitarist in the band ZOPA. The Perfume Burned His Eyes (Akashic Books), his debut novel, begins in 1976. Matthew is a 16-year-old boy living in Jackson Heights, Queens. After losing his two most important male role models – his father and grandfather – his mother use her inheritance to uproot Matthew and herself to a posh apartment building in Manhattan. “The city” is an entirely new and strange world for Matthew. But he soon befriends Lou Reed, who lives in the same building and eventually becomes an unorthodox father figure for him. The novel is written from the point of view of Matthew at age 18, two years after the story begins, and concludes in 2013, three days after Lou Reed’s death, with Matthew in his fifties.

Thurston Moore is a musician, writer, publisher, record label owner, and the founder of Sonic Youth. Currently, he performs and records solo, with various ensembles, and with his band, The Thurston Moore Group. He has worked with Yoko Ono, John Zorn, Bobby Gillespie, David Toop, Cecil Taylor, Faust, Glenn Branca, and many others. Alongside his various activities in the music world, he is involved with publishing and poetry and teaches writing at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. He is at work on his forthcoming memoir Sonic Life. Moore and his wife, Eva Prinz, operate the publishing company Ecstatic Peace Library, as well as the independent record label The Daydream Library Series.